Three ideas to spark UMA builders ahead of Graph Hack

tl;dr If you’re hungry for ideas to build with UMA, Across or Outcome.Finance at Graph Hack this weekend, this article summarizes a few viable, creative concepts to get you started including: building a zero-slippage, gas-less optimistic DEX; establishing token floor price guarantees with KPI options; and creating an Across subgraph that includes all fill and deposit data.

Build with UMA, Across or Outcome.Finance at Graph Hack

As we look forward to this weekend’s Graph Hack hackathon in San Francisco, we’re excited to share a few concepts for potential UMA builders. These are designed to jumpstart creativity among the hundreds of hackers to build something cool using UMA’s optimistic oracle (OO), the Across bridge and/or Outcome.Finance’s DAO governance and treasury tooling.

Core members of UMA will be in San Francisco from Friday, June 3 to Sunday, June 5 for the three-day hackathon, which aims to supercharge decentralization and expand the web3 ecosystem. An estimated 800+ hackers will be competing for more than $430,000 in total prizes at the hackathon that will also feature a $4,000 prize from Risk Labs, the team and foundation behind UMA, Across and Outcome.

We thought this would be a good time to share a few strong ideas, but first, let’s explore UMA and its OO.

UMA is the game-changing oracle for web3

UMA is an optimistic oracle (OO) that can provide and verify any arbitrary data on-chain. UMA’s optimistic oracle has been called “a human-powered truth machine.” Data from UMA secures markets and smart contracts across Web3, expanding the developer design space. The OO tells smart contracts “things about the world” so they can enforce real-world payout conditions.

UMA’s OO provides human-powered data dispute resolution between smart contracts.

Proposed data will not be scrutinized unless it is disputed, and disputes are rare. That’s what makes our oracle optimistic.

The Across bridge, Polymarket prediction markets, and Outcome.Finance DAO tools are three of the many great use cases for the OO.

Join the hackathon and earn prizes

The best use case using the optimistic oracle, Across or Outcome tooling will win $4,000. The winners could also be eligible to receive a further grant if you continue building on our platforms. Hacking begins on Friday, June 3 with judging taking place on Sunday, June 5 from 9am-noon PT.

The opportunities for the OO are limitless, but here are three great ideas to get the creative juices flowing. These ideas represent products that could be built at this hackathon or at any point by anybody, thereafter.

Build a zero-slippage, gas-less optimistic DEX

You could use UMA to build a zero-slippage gas-less optimistic DEX, where assets are swapped within a smart contract based on orders published by users, but bundled and executed on-chain by relayers. Like with Across Protocol, the other side of the trade can be provided out of the relayer’s pocket and the relayer can get paid back (plus fees) after a challenge window.

This is basically adapting the Across relayer pattern for swaps.

Unlike other DEXes, it doesn’t matter if you have liquidity in the swap contract because the price is provided optimistically by the relayer or specified in the order. You can get the price from any good source, even an aggregated price from multiple centralized or decentralized exchanges, or let the user specify what they’ll accept.

The user could also specify limits, stops, expiration times for execution, if -> then conditional flows, and any other requirements, all in the order that gets published off-chain somewhere and then executed by the relayer.

For extra points you could integrate this with Across Protocol for zero-slippage cross-chain swaps. The simpler version, for a hackathon proof-of-concept, could simply allow optimistic relayer execution against a pool contract where traders deposit their funds and then post orders later.

Establish token floor price guarantees with KPI options

You could use KPI options to provide a floor price guarantee for buyers of a new token during a token generation event.

Token prices can be very spiky, especially in the weeks and months after a token generation event, so a “floor price” KPI option can reassure early buyers and smooth out trading on the lower end.

In this scenario, the buyers receive both the token and an additional LSP token that represents a claim on some ETH, BTC, or stablecoin that the project team raised during initial funding. If the regular token price drops below a certain level, they get a bigger payout from the LSP token. This gives buyers confidence that they retain some minimum value if the token price trends downward.

This is a powerful use case that can easily be implemented using UMA’s existing contracts, which makes it a great hackathon project. It would be even more interesting if it was incorporated into a comprehensive fundraising strategy for a new DAO or protocol issuing a token, which could include success tokens, outcome-based KPI options issued to specific teams, or other clever applications of UMA’s contract systems.

Create an Across V2 subgraph that includes all fill and deposit data

This concept would be super helpful for Across’s frontend interface. If we assume that the graph is a valid source of truth (or could provide redundancy), this potential solution could help us to solve the issue of better estimating utilization + APY percentages and blocking deposits that couldn’t be immediately filled based on liquid reserves.

Hopefully these ideas help to stoke your creative fire.

We look forward to seeing you at Graph Hack this weekend and we invite you to get in touch via our Discord channel and Twitter.